The present invention relates to a metering pump, designed to be mounted by means of a screw, snap-fit, welded connection, etc., on various rigid or flexible receptacles such as bottles, tubes or pots, in particular receptacles containing cosmetic or pharmaceutical products or alternatively food products, of different viscosities which may range from liquid products to products with a creamy consistency.
Different types of metering pumps have been on the market for a number of years, all of which require the use of a certain number of parts such as springs, bearings, valves, stoppers and others. The main disadvantage of such pumps is that they are made up of a number of parts and the cost of manufacturing and assembling these parts is high.
In order to remedy these disadvantages, metering pumps have already been proposed, which comprise a pump body which can be adapted to fit a receptacle and communicates with the internal part of the latter, as well as control means, cooperating with the pump body to define a metering chamber, which can be operated from the exterior so as to be displaced between a dispensing position and a non-operating position to enable a metered quantity of product to be ejected from the metering chamber to the exterior via an ejection orifice and then transfer a new metered quantity of product from the receptacle to the metering chamber and so on.
With this design known from the prior art, the control means are elastically returned from the dispensing position to the non-operating position once they are longer subjected to an external constraint, in order to create a vacuum pressure so that a metered quantity of product can be drawn towards the metering chamber.
In spite of their undeniable specific properties, the disadvantage of such metering pumps is that they are often relatively expensive.
The objective of the present invention is to overcome these drawbacks by proposing a simple, efficient and reliable metering pump, which is also remarkably inexpensive to manufacture.